Today was the day that made all the work seem worthwhile. A lot of people’s projects are starting to really look nice: Brittany’s concrete bench, Ty and Chris’s backsplash for the dump space, even Lyle’s full-height wall is growing on me.

Today was also a major victory for the gabions. Luke finished forming the remaining gabions while I adjusted some of the shading structure’s hardware to accommodate the addition. He kept working on those like a champ while I fixed them in place and began adding rock. We planned on adding lids once the rock was added but later decided to leave them open except for a few rebar ties. The cages will still hold their shape, it’ll save us hours on stitching, and should make for a nice, uninhibited moment at the bench.

We finished and filled all ten cages well before the end of the day. I started working with Paul and Mike on the cedar bench which should be done by tomorrow. We even began adding rock between the gabions and the pavers of the ‘street’. From a distance, it looks as if the rock has suddenly been sucked up into a vertical sheet just in front of the cabin. As nice as the interior is looking, the shading structure is quickly becoming a very special space. Tomorrow we’ll add some more rock between the shading structure and the cabin to really make it pop.

It felt like one step forward and two steps back today. There’s not much to show for today’s work, but I think we’re in a position to make a lot of progress tomorrow. Luke and I began by emptying the rock from the gabions on the north side. Without the rock we could get a better idea of the damage. Paul and I managed to repair three of them (not counting the angled one salvaged yesterday), but two are seemingly out of commission.

Luke and I started working on the south side gabions as soon as Nick brought some 24in mesh. We resolved to build two gabions for each bay or ten total. We spent the rest of the day in manufacture mode. Luke would shape the metal which I would stitch together before adding a bottom. We had seven cages in various stages of completion by the end of the day.

We talked quite a bit with Mikey and Paul about adding the bench and the particulars of that connection. It looks like we’ll move the gabions in line with the center of the columns and then fasten two ‘T’s’ on either side to act as a bench. We’ll have to make a couple cuts in the mesh in order to fit around the columns’ hardware, but I think it’s the right move.

We got to work by cleaning the rock inside the gabions built yesterday. Once they had dried a bit, Luke and I brought them inside and tipped them into position along the north wall. The steel was mutilated. The rock that we used (crushed granite) was so heavy that any maneuvering caused the weight to shift and crush the thin steel mesh. They looked pretty good from a distance, but the damage was clear up close. The sight of the gabions (all that work!) being mangled left me feeling pretty distraught the rest of the morning.

Luckily Luke never feels distraught. While Ty and I washed the rest of the rock, he began prepping the east side for a second attempt. We fastened the empty gabions to the furring strips on the wall and tied them together. Then we began adding the rock evenly in all of the gabions simultaneously before stitching the tops. Success! By filling them in place, the steel remained intact and very crisp-looking.

The trade-off, of course, is that the gabions will be immobile and therefore more difficult to disassemble. But based on today’s lesson, it’s clear that we were wrong to ever consider them mobile in the first place. Rock that dense is just too heavy to move around once inside the gabion. Tomorrow we’ll begin work on the gabions for the south side which will be a different size. Hopefully there will be time to perform some repairs on the maimed gabions and refill them using the improved method…

Quite the day. We began by positioning the shading structure. It was already assembled and braced, but it needed to be moved to its final position. I took measurements while Nick used the forklift to coerce the structure into place; Ty used the sledgehammer for the fine tuning. The job was made more difficult by the exposed aggregate concrete on that section of the floor (it’s complicated a few tasks, actually).

I worked with Mikey for the better part of the morning adding the rest of the louvers to the shading structure. The rock was delivered in the afternoon so Luke and I began filling the gabions. I’ve been worried about the rock settling so we added the rock while the steel cage sat against a board with a curved base. As Luke added the rock, I shook the board back and forth so that the rock would settle more tightly.  We filled five plus the angled one which should be enough to reach under the window on the north side. We can wash and place them tomorrow morning.

By that time it was starting to get late, but we were asked to add blocking between the cabin, the shade structure, and the walkway on the west. Nick ordered everyone pizza for the extra effort. Before we called it a day, Dusty alerted me to an issue on the east side: an electrical box was installed a few inches off the ground exactly where the gabions would sit. So I spent the rest of the evening clipping an outlet-sized hole in one of the cages. I added some extra steel to direct the loads and (hopefully) prevent the steel from sagging.